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UPDATE: Fuel economy for the 2013 Ford Fusion has been announced with the Fusion Hybrid rated at an impressive 47/47 mpg city/highway. Click Here to get the full fuel economy breakdown in Wide Open Throttle.

We’ve heard this one before. Every builder of a midsize sedan since, at least, the first serious Nissan Altima a decade ago claims to have broken the mold with a sporty looking, sporty handling answer to all the vanilla appliances out there. You won’t, they claim, have trouble finding their affordable sport sedan in a parking lot full of Camraccordsonaltimas.

So it’s no surprise when Chris Hamilton, the British exterior design chief of the all-new, 2013 Ford Fusion and Mondeo, says this: “We put a lot of emphasis, to create something that we think will be different in the marketplace. We’ll have a sophisticated feel. We’ll be elegant. We’ll be somewhat unexpected in North America, from Ford, and we’ll set ourselves apart from Camry and Accord … We wanted to create a beautiful-looking car. That’s always been our number-one objective.”

J Mays said in our November 2011 issue that the production 2013 Ford Fusion unveiled at the 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit would borrow heavily from the Evos concept revealed at Frankfurt last fall. As on the Evos, the large, expressive six-point lower fascia from the Focus and Fiesta has been moved up the nose to become the Fusion/Mondeo’s grille, the headlamps are narrow slits that avoid the bug-eye (not to be confused with the Austin-Healey Sprite’s) lamps infesting the rest of the midsize segment lately and the fast roofline gives the car an almost four-door coupe’ look.

“You’re the first to hear this,” Samantha Hoyt, Fusion’s marketing manager tells Motor Trend. “We will be the first to offer a gas, a hybrid and a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.” The Fusion Energi goes on sale roughly five months after the Fusion and Fusion Hybrid.

Our first look came so early, in fact, that the car was really more Mondeo than Fusion, with a metric speedometer (okay, perhaps it’s Canadian), with taillamp trim and other details that had yet to be finalized. We hear some final design details were still to be worked out after the NAIAS unveiling. With the official on-sale date about eight months away, it’s clear Ford was eager to pull its unveiling forward early enough to make the Detroit show.

Ford says the on-sale date will be late summer, with serious stock getting into dealerships by early fall. The new ’13 Honda Accord and Nissan Altima both launch within a few months of the Ford. Chevrolet will have the eAssist ’13 Malibu Eco on sale for several months, though you’ll have to wait until autumn if you want a non-Eco Malibu with the new 2.5-liter four. By then, we’ll know whether Volkswagen’s strategy of designing a bigger, specific Passat for North America (and China and South Korea) is successful in the marketplace.

In normal times, the plug-in hybrid version would be enough to distinguish the Fusion in this segment. Despite all the talk of Americans downsizing to compact cars, the midsize segment is heating up, fueled by Ford’s much-improved quality scores, Toyota and Honda‘s natural and man-made troubles and new models from South Korea and VW stepping in to relieve supply shortages.

It’s clear, too, that Ford noticed when enthusiasts wrote into motortrend.com online forums and in our letters section of how they’d take that last Mondeo over the 2006-12 Fusion, any day. Shortly after the first Fusion launched, Alan Mulally started the One Ford program, with corporate brass recognizing the cost-saving advantages in combining mainstream European models with mainstream North American models, while figuring that Americans finally are ready to buy global cars.

Fusion ditches its Mazda6-based platform to join the Mondeo on a heavily reworked version of the previous Mondeo’s platform. The new Mondeo is not only sleeker than the ’12 Fusion, it’s sleeker, sportier than the Mondeo it replaces, Hamilton says. His design team put a lot more effort in the four-door sedan. In Europe, the Mondeo wagon and hatchback are much bigger sellers.

“It’s not an evolution of today’s Fusion. It’s something different. It needed to be new. And it needed to be perceived as new. I find [Malibu] more evolutionary. We didn’t want to do that at all.”

If not for all the equity Ford has built for the Fusion name in the last six years, it could have taken the Mondeo name.

“From a design point of view, we weren’t necessarily thinking about just Camry, Accord, Malibu, those sorts of things. We were thinking about all the global inputs. We were taking into account inputs from outside the segment as well, from BMW and Mercedes,” he says.

“The hardest cars to do are these cars. They have to be everything to all people. They have to be great to look at, they have to be great to drive, and they have to be functional,” Hamilton continues. “It’s very easy to create a good-looking car. You just have to lower the roof, put big wheels on it, put a big engine, a long hood.”

Easily said if you don’t care about function and interior space, this segment’s raison d’etre. Hamilton’s design team managed to inject that sort of styling without degrading interior space. The front seats are as commodious as expected, but so too are the back seats, which have ample headroom and legroom for a six-footer. The back seat seems wide enough for three adults in a pinch, though as in most competitors, the rear of the center console, with its rear-seat vents, seems to encroach on the unlucky adult who gets the middle seat. It’s competitive with the ’13 Chevy Malibu, which has good rear seat room despite a shorter wheelbase and faster roofline than its predecessor. Ford needed to avoid the mistakes it made with the 1996 “ovoid” and current Taurus, which both have tight rear-seat headroom, especially for ingress and egress.

Though various editors of varying height will have to cycle through the rear seat to give a definitive opinion, Your Humble Servant had no issues getting in and out of the back.

That ovoid Taurus and its immediate successor, you’ll recall, were in the Fusion’s d-segment — or c/d-segment as Ford prefers to call it — when Ford dropped the name and replaced it with the Fusion for the 2006 model year. Before CEO Alan Mulally brought the exclusively North American Taurus back to replace the full-size Five Hundred, it had been an odd kind of midsize duck itself, V-6 only and a bit larger on the outside than the Toyota/Honda competition before their midsize cars grew in overall length.

The new Fusion joins the Hyundai Sonata, Kia Optima, Buick Regal and ’13 Malibu in scrubbing V-6 engine options. Ford has replaced the SEL trim level with Platinum, befitting the new car’s richer look. The high-volume SE and the straight-to-rental S trim levels remain. The SE line has two sub-trim packages, Appearance and Luxury, to gum up this simplicity. (The sidebar on powertrains endeavors to sort this out.) Platinum takes SEL’s space atop the lineup, though like the Focus Platinum, it’s premium enough to compete with Buicks, and could easily be priced just below where the next Lincoln MKZ will start.

In Western Europe, compacts have long been the center of the market. Cars like the Mondeo are a step closer to premium, or “executive” sedans.

“The c/d-segment is the heart of the market, with 80 percent of the segment covered by six competitors,” Hoyt says. They represent about 1.5-million units, she says, or 13 percent to 15 percent of volume and will grow with the industry to 2-million plus by 2017. They are Fusion, Camry, Accord, Malibu, Altima and Sonata, Hoyt says, “Sonata being the surprise.”

It sure is. The new Fusion/Mondeo’s roofline, especially at the c-pillar, resembles the Sonata’s, or perhaps even more its platform-sibling, the Kia Optima’s. For the record, the new Fusion/Mondeo’s design would have been locked in before the new Sonata went on sale about two years ago.

Ford calls the sporty roofline “silhouette innovation,” ridding the Fusion of its three-box look without sacrificing interior or trunk space.

“We’ve done clever tricks with where we got the H-point, where the beltlines are, sections in the roof, and things like that, to make sure the glass looks coupe-like and has a sort of sporty feel to it,” Hamilton says. “But we’re not compromising on egress, we’re not compromising on vision and we’re not compromising on headroom.”

One designer’s trick is the slightly rising beltline. As that line merges with the roofline at the c-pillar, the rising line gives the perception that the cabin is much tighter than it really is, Hamilton says. So the roofline is actually higher than it looks over the rear seat, and there’s a lot of space.

“It’s a fairly long car,” Hamilton says, “but the elegance was important. You get that by stretching out long, sinewy surfaces and linework. That character line that connects headlights and taillights was key. That sophistication in the bodysides, we don’t have that in today’s Fusion, which has a kind of mechanical surfacing. We wanted that feel of, that it felt sort of crafted, that somebody made it by hand and had worked on the surfaces rather than being machined by a computer and sent down the production line.”

Wind tunnel testing gives the Fusion/Mondeo a drag coefficient of about 0.28, he says. “It was important to have a visual lightness about it. So we did a lot of work thinning the a-pillars, working the bodyside sections so it doesn’t feel heavy and cumbersome.”

Hamilton’s design team worked on aero tricks in the front and rear corners of the car. The new Fusion’s corners are very chamfered, or rounded, whereas most commodity cars square those corners off and make it look rounded with visual tricks.

The takeaway from Hamilton’s Fusion/Mondeo design review is that Ford worked hard to make it come off as a premium sedan that can compete with, and beat cost-conscious commodity sedans. Take the trunklid sacrifice panel, designed to take rear impact and allow a lower trunk floor height.

“If you look at the back of a Jaguar XF, which has a similar area, it does not have this panel,” Hamilton says. You’ll see an offset here of about 60mm. Jaguar used to be our sister company. We know they wanted to do this for the XF, and they couldn’t afford to do it.

“It’s an expensive part of what we do … but we had to do it. The message is, we didn’t cut any costs in the car.”

Will it pay off? Can the new Ford Fusion, like the Bush I/Clinton-era Taurus, compete with Camry and Accord for top sales spot in the U.S.?

“Our competitors, Camry and Accord, are in the 400 to 450 (thousand) range,” says marketing chief Hoyt. Ford sold nearly 250,000 last year. “We need at least 300,000 to be even close.”

The Ford Fusion Hybrid has been a critical, if not sales, success since it was introduced for the 2010 model year. We marveled at its Toyota Prius-topping electric-only max speed of 47 mph when we named the Fusion line our 2010 Car of the Year. Ford takes it one better with the ’13 Fusion, which returns with a hybrid version, and will add a plug-in electric Energi version sharing powertrain technology with the upcoming C-Max MPV. The Fusion Energi launches about five months after the Fusion and Fusion Hybrid. While details were skimpy at presstime, we can report:

Fusion Energi’s EPA e-mpg equivalent is rumored to be about 8 mpg higher than the Chevrolet Volt‘s, for 102, and will travel up to 21 miles on full electric power, about 14 miles short of the Volt.

Highlights from Chief Engineer Adrian Whittle

With a much larger bodyshell than either the outgoing Fusion or Mondeo, the new car has about 10-percent high-strength steel, mostly in the front-end and the A-B (door ring). The new 2.5-liter is a bit heavier than the old, while most other versions are the same weight or slightly lighter, thanks to the new EcoBoost engines.

The Fusion’s conventional six-speed automatic features a torque converter with a rising K factor. Whittle avoided the Focus’ PowerShift dual-clutch automatic for this bigger, more powerful car, though the Mondeo will be available with a carryover diesel engine and dual-clutch transmission.

Converging American and European versions, the Mondeo has a better ride without degrading dynamics, while the Fusion has much-improved handing and steering without degrading comfort. An integral link rear suspension, like the kind used in BMWs, replaces an unequal-length control arm rear suspension.

The only chassis difference is that the Fusion was tuned for all-season tires, while the Mondeo uses summer tires. Whittle says those differences are much less pronounced as the European-spec tires due to new fuel efficient tread compounds.

The car had electric power assisted steering (EPAS) from the beginning of its development, and Whittle promises it’s as quick and has as much feedback as the old Mondeo, while making parking maneuvers easier and reaping the fuel mileage benefits of EPAS.

“It feels like you’re driving a smaller car,” Whittle says of the Fusion/Mondeo’s dynamics. “It’s very predictable, very quick to change directions.”

Horsepower

2013 Ford Fusion News and Reviews

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